Starbucks New Value Proposition: Incubator For Modern Entrepreneurs

A month had passed since Craig Madaus had lost his job. After a long career in the advertising and print media industry, Madaus was spending his days job hunting, taking Yoga classes, and wondering what was next. “Those were long days,” he told us. “I would wake up, walk around New York City, and hopefully get a job interview. Yoga gave me a reason to get out of the apartment and do something. It gave me a place to go. And, if I didn’t have anything else to do that day, I would hang out at Starbucks—where maybe I could drum up a conversation with someone who might know of a job.”

Madaus, like many lost their job during the recent recession, found himself in a predicament—he was unemployed, companies weren’t hiring, and his only option seemed to be self-reinvention. But, what does that look like? Where does a person start?

To make ends meet, Madaus got a job as member of the deck crew on a sailboat. The crew’s job was simple: to deliver a boat from the manufacturer in Connecticut to the customer in St. Thomas.

Re-invention was close. Craig Madaus would soon bump into his future almost as accidentally as we bumped into his story. And, as soon as we heard it, we had to know more.

David Sturt and Todd Nordstrom: So, you’re on the boat, and you run into a storm. Tell us more.

Craig Madaus: “Yes, a day into the second leg of the trip, between Bermuda and St. Thomas, we encountered 30 feet waves and winds at 35 knots. Struggling to steer, our boom ultimately broke and split in half. It was terrifying but we muscled through it. There was a bigger problem though—the refrigerator was broken and we still had five days on the open sea. We were down to one sail, our food supply was rotting, and the boat was taking on water.”

Sturt and Nordstrom: Doesn’t seem like the best situation for innovative thinking…

Madaus: No, it doesn’t. The crew decided to split the duties of emptying water by taking turns. Everyone got a shift. My shift was 2 am to 4 am. I remember thinking about my yoga classes—lugging around a big water bottle after classes into job interviews. And, that night, while I was smashing plastic bottles to make more room for accumulating trash, I noticed something. The concave bottom of the bottle made it impossible to flatten the bottles completely.

Sturt and Nordstrom: So, that night you get the idea to reinvent the water bottle?

Madaus: Yea. It sounds simple. But, then I started thinking about it. I could create something that not only holds water in, but keeps water out. It could be used as a dry-pack for people on a canoe trip or overnight hike. If it was flexible enough, you could fill it with rice, beans, cell phones, passports, or whatever you need to keep dry. That’s where I got the idea for silicone.

Sturt and Nordstrom: The functionality of the bottle is really cool. It can be heated in a microwave as a hot pack. In fact, we saw a video that shows a guy boiling water in a Bubi Bottle over an open flame. It’s cool. However, you’re story still gets more intriguing.

Sturt and Nordstrom: So, you have the idea for the bottle. What’d you do next?

Madaus: I asked a friend, Kelly Torrence, to draw up a design. I made a small business card with a picture of the bottle and place where a person could write down their email dress and tell me what color they were prefer. And, then I started talking to people.

Sturt and Nordstrom: Wait. So, you started talking to people before you even had a prototype? Who’d you talk to? Where?